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Peter Nohrnberg asks how and why a collection of lyrics is transformed into a unified book. The topic is largely unexplored, and is important in several theoretical dimensions. Also, it activates an additional level of attention in the reading of lyric volumes. Nohrnberg’s subject is not the lyric sequence, a recognized form, but the ordinary collections of poems. For his examples the author dwells on W. B. Yeats’s The Tower and Robert Lowell’s Life Studies. As Nohrnberg applies the distinction between poets of product and poets of process not to individual poems but to books of poems, he breaks new ground. His methods of reading books as well as poems will surely be imitated and extended by others. Among the especially productive concepts are that the first and last poems in the volume perform functions of framing, inaugurating, anticipating, summarizing, etc., and that one or more poems in the collection mirror the self-reflection and the reader’s experience of the book as a whole. He also explores the parallel or repeating structures and forms, implied plots, and interwoven motifs and themes. Winner of both the undergraduate Thomas Temple Hoopes Prize and the LeBaron Russell Briggs Prize, this thesis offers marvelously fresh, perceptive comments on particular poems within these volumes.

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Now Available: The digital Loeb Classical Library (loebclassics.com) extends the founding mission of James Loeb with an interconnected, fully searchable, perpetually growing virtual library of all that is important in Greek and Latin literature.

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When transportation involved wind power by sea and animal power by land, few items could be profitably shipped over anything but the shortest distance. This fact made production a hostage of consumption since people were tied to the land. Production, in other words, was forcibly bundled with consumption. Globalization can be thought of as a progressive reversal of this forcible bundling. But the bundling was not enforced by shipping costs alone. Three costs of distance mattered: the cost of moving goods, the cost of moving ideas, and the cost of moving people. It is useful to think of the three costs as forming three constraints that limit the separation of production and consumption. One of…